Video Software Laboratory

APPLE SIRI & Resource Description Framework-a

The Apple iphone audience is excited about Siri on the new iPhone 4S. Apple’s
acquisition of Siri in 2010 has become a voice-activated “personal assistant”
which can at your voice request pull up Wikipedia info about celebrities or else
calculate the number of days until your next meeting. Its natural language
expertise and semantic technology also include GPS to provide a map and route.
Though there may still be some U.S.-centricity. Siri has hard core semantic
technology. Like the Facebook OpenGraph story, this is another example of
semantic web going mainstream. The Open Graph front story was all about social
media, but the back story was their adoption of RDFa from the semantic web
community.

Android makes significant use of XML already, but although XML Schema is
sufficient for exchanging data between parties who have agreed to the
definitions beforehand, their lack of semantics prevents machines from reliably
performing this task with new XML vocabularies. In addition, the expressive
power of RDF
and RDF Schema
(RDFS)
while a significant improvement over XML, is still very limited. RDF is roughly
limited to binary ground predicates and RDF Schema is roughly limited to a
subclass hierarchy and a property hierarchy with domain and range definitions.

For machines to perform useful automatic reasoning tasks on Web documents, the
language machines use must go beyond the basic semantics of XML Schema and RDF
Schema. They will require a more expressive
and reasoning ontology language, as a result, the W3C has defined Web Ontology
Language
(called OWL).

However, these advances are still away in the distance while RDFa is
available now to show significant progress for Android apps.

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference - Washington, D.C. is on
November 29 - December 1 for presentations, panels, case studies, and
conversations. At the event, you'll connect with other business and technology
executives and learn how to take advantage of semantic technologies in your
enterprise and web-based systems.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) model defines a semantic graph as an arbitrary collection of triples. RDFa creates structured information that is human/machine-readable. Concepts such as people,
places, events, and things can be marked up in Web documents.
An RDFa store provides standard interfaces for the management of database connections (such as Oracle, MySQL, Berkeley DB, etc..).
In addition, it provides interfaces for the manipulation, management, and/or retrieval of triples (including inferenced results).

For ease of use and clarity RDF can be converted into HTML or RDFa format for
the Web.